With most brands jumping unto the Influencer Marketing bandwagon, we thought to help our followers with a guide on how to choose the right influencers. Your brand’s success will depend on finding the influencers whose following and content match your brand’s identity and vision.
- For starters, finding an influencer with a following demographic that matches your brand’s audience is a good place to start. When you make a good connection with an influencer’s audience, you have a unique opportunity to dial into ongoing conversations with your brand. Let me walk you through identifying whether an influencer’s audience falls within your target group. Imagine a brand that sells cooking oil. They will have conversations with women online. We will be on the lookout for women who run households and not just that, but people curated by influencers. A celebrity may not necessarily work because even though this influencer might run a household, the purpose for which people follow might be for their music, their fashion etc. So here is the trick; can the influencer use the product in her household and family? Have you seen any engagements from her followers discussing general household conversations and their day-to-day issues? Will the influencer comfortably run us through her daily activities and have other women followers share their experiences?
For example, we run a You Deserve to Be Well activation for Frytol and we wanted to reward women especially since they are the core target market of the brand. We decided to go to women influencers who are known to take us through their daily routines and share their struggles. With these mother influencers, it is easy to share home remedies that their followers can relate to and patronize. We used Chichi Yakubu (a food entrepreneur and mother who recently started a series on balancing motherhood, work and family) as one of the influencers and you would notice that compared to most women influencers, she actively discusses a wide range of issues about family, marriage, work and life, and most of her followers often comment and share their own ideas. Not only did they drive massive awareness about the campaign, they delivered on repurchase because the women had a full-blown discourse on their favorite things to do to rest and rejuvenate as well as favorite recipes that they make with Frytol.
2. Secondly, you can use the style of content an influencer creates to sense check if they are a good match for your brand. Influencer content is varied in terms of style of content. Between pictures and videos, through complex Tik Toks and YouTube videos, no matter the viral nature of an influencers content, if the style doesn’t resonate with your target audience, it will be a hard sell. Your target audience is the reason why you are running this campaign anyway and should not feel lost in the campaign. You can be innovative and explore new ways but it must always be relevant to the target market. We run a campaign for GHIPPS interoperability where their main objective was to create awareness about the ease in transferring money across networks and initially, the client wanted us to hero with Mega influencers who would create awareness about the service but that’s what has been done in the past and it did not make so much of an impact. We decided to profile mobile money users online and use content creators who will create comic content about our daily activities that require the use of mobile money. We got Welbie to do a comic animation of his stick characters and it went viral on Twitter with over 30,000 views and 160,000 impressions in less than a week. We got SDK to do skits with his family and that was targeted at the masses since they love his content among a few others. We explored these new styles despite GHIPPS not being a brand that would naturally use this medium but eventually it worked and we had people forwarding the content on WhatsApp.
3. Also, what you are looking to achieve plays a role in your choice of influencers. Do you want direct sales? Do you want awareness? Do you want followers of the influencer to perform a specific action? All of this is important in selecting an influencer. There are some influencers who work better with creating awareness. They have the numbers and will give you the reach and impressions which works well if that’s your ultimate goal. But if you are trying to get purchase, conversion or trial, your aim should be to find high engagement over reach; comments, reposts etc.
We recently ran an activation with Nivea, partnering with Joey B because he has a loyal following who jump on his trends. All he had to do was put out a video throwing the challenge at them and they jumped on it and gave us the results we needed. We backed it up with micro influencers who are also friends with their followers so it was easy to play it out without it looking forced.
Influencer Marketing achieves high results, and it’s even better when you partner with an agency that works to understand your brand and match you with the influencer that will bring the same dedication to your campaign as we will.
At Influencer Africa, we are here to make this journey easy for you. We have curated a large pool of influencers from mega to nano; across the African region. Our register of influencers spans different areas of interest and industries including food, lifestyle, health, fashion, tech and family life. Follow our page for guides on influencer marketing or send me a DM let me make this journey easier for you.
Written by: Sheila Kutsienyo – General Manager, Influencer Africa
